Still feeling the aftershocks of the Super Bowl results from last weekend, my thoughts go to New Orleans, and I can’t help thinking about the last couple of projects we have created for that city. Interestingly, both projects were donor walls. I want to share one of these projects with you.

Although the overall size of the project may make it seem more like an architectural project, it was mostly made up of smaller individual panels, much within the scope of an award-oriented business.

The general layout of the project. Stencils applied to individual panels.

The object of this project was to create a donor wall for the Insectarium of the Audubon Nature Center. As often happens, the project was conceived by an architect in collaboration with an interior designer with the concept that 42 individual panels should be etched with donor names. The panels would be suspended by a wire cable system from ceiling to floor. The panels would have different sizes, with larger panels (9” x 21”) on top followed by panels cascading downwards in decreasing sizes (7” x 21”, 6” x 18”, 4 1/2” x 15”) creating sort of an inverted pyramid shape.

The donor levels would be signified by a different insect for each level so as to not mention any actual dollar amounts. There would be six rows of panels, each row consisting of seven panels. The arrangement of smaller panels would have a larger header panel designating the organization the donors had contributed to.

All small panels were custom made of 1/4”-thick crystal-clear glass with pencil-polished edges. The large header had an arched top and was made from 1/2” crystal-clear glass measuring 20” x 66”. The text was to be deep carved and color filled. Since the lettering was not small (5/8” & 3/4”), we decided to plotter cut the stencil from a soft vinyl material that is 11 mils thick that would allow us to carve to the desired depth. The insects, however, were detailed enough to cause us to create photo resists of them and plug them into a “window” cut into the pre-cut vinyl stencil. In order to work efficiently, we applied all stencils to the panels and weeded out the lettering.

The pre-made photo resists were adhered in the open areas cut into the vinyl, the cover sheets removed and the transition areas between the vinyl and the photo resist was taped off to make sure that no gaps would be accidentally blasted. This concluded all the preparatory work, and the actual blasting process could begin. It requires quite a bit of experience and concentration to carve multiple panels with lettering and have them all turn out more or less the same depth.

In order to have the best chance for this to happen, it is always advisable to do a few sample pieces before beginning work on the actual panels. For this we cut a few extra stencils and blasted them until we achieved the desired depth while actually establishing a counting pattern while blasting each letter so that we would know how many passes it would take for each letter to achieve the carved depth we were looking for. Only this way can one be fairly certain that all panels will look the same, since they were individual panels and not side by side for comparison possibilities.

Blasting the panels.             A color filled etched panel.             A carved main panel. The finished project.

After all panels were blasted, the abrasive dust had to be thoroughly removed from the panels in preparation for the color filling. We blew compressed air across the surface of the glass and then rinsed each panel under water to make sure that no dust would be left to contaminate the paint. Silver color filling was in the specs for the job. Since there are many shades of silver available, we had created samples for the client with carved letters and had color filled them so that they could pick the coloration they wanted us to use on the final pieces.

All panels were going to be mounted inside of a building and not exposed to the elements. We chose a well-known brand of spray paint and moved our painting operation to the great outdoors to avoid filling our workspace air with paint fumes. In spray painting it is important to spray several thin coats of paint rather than one heavy one to avoid puddleing or running of the paint.

It is also necessary to spray from different directions since the letters were carved deep and had sidewalls that needed to be covered with paint as well. We only sprayed a couple of panels at a time, because we needed to be able to remove the stencil material after painting relatively quickly, before the paint would dry completely, in order to avoid the tearing of the paint along the letter edges because of it having bonded with the stencil material.

After the resist removal, we left the panels out to dry for a couple of days before completing the final clean up of all panels and before packing them for shipment to New Orleans. When packing projects like this, we always include plans with the intended layout and the sequence in which the pieces need to be installed. We had contracted with a local sign company from New Orleans to do the installation but also did not want to take a chance on any mistakes; therefore, we traveled onsite to oversee the installation.

The cable system the architect had chosen was somewhat complex, with clips needing to be installed on the cables which would hold each small panel in place. The cables were connected by two tension anchors to the wall at top and bottom, and all cable lengths in between the panels had to be carefully calculated for proper lengths so that all columns would look the same.

Only the large header panel was attached to the wall with stand-offs, and it also had a special feature. It was specified that the butterfly should be a metal cutout attached above the glass to give a 3D effect. Three metal pieces were required: one square in brass to have a gold color for the background of the butterfly, another piece we had water-jet cut with the actual butterfly outline markings out of black anodized aluminum, with a second piece of white anodized aluminum filling the spaces behind the outline.

Confused? Well, the picture may explain it better. The two butterfly metal parts were installed in front of the brass part with a spacer for distance between the two pieces for maximum effect. All in all we were pretty happy with the final piece, even though one aspect was not to our satisfaction: the background color of the wall. It is usually a losing battle to try to convince clients that the backdrop to etched glass should be a darker color in order to have the etching stand out. Here also we did not get our request honored. The color filling helps somewhat but it could have been much better with a dark gray or medium blue as the background. Oh well. To quote the Stones: you can’t always get what you want.
© Ruth L Dobbins 2010